Maybe on this day, as on so many other previous days over the last year, you find yourself sitting around the proverbial fire as you and the generations before you have done. The chant of history runs through your mind’s eye in song and vision, and your dream of how life might unfold, or maybe you contemplate the legacy of a people who have lived with what they were given by the earth. But today, you are visited by an alien. Maybe the alien looks like you, maybe not. What does an alien look like anyway? For us, the alien has a big head with large dark eyes, but to the man next to the fire, was his alien my ancestor? Was he an alien man with ideas of domesticating nature, enslaving his fellow man, and allocating the resources of the land to those who shared his privilege? Just how strange is it to sit around the fire with that alien? Does he share your pipe or reject it? Does he share knowledge and stoke the embers in the fire to help keep you warm? Or did the alien give you the short end of his stick, a kind of anal probe? Are you living with your alien? Are you your own alien? How is it that we invite the alien into our lives? Is the alien’s story your story? Or do you just allow it to be because you have become too weak to remember your own? Without tradition, without history, without community, we allow the alien to overtake us, infect us, and subsume us. Our lives are short, experiences fleeting, and opportunities rare. Why would we happily allow our freedom to be taken away, to sacrifice the chant of our story for the song of the alien? Maybe it is time for us to subvert the alien, to take back the chant, to sing our own song, to celebrate the land we live upon, to smell the flowers, and to help the alien see life from a new point of view.

But do we still have a point of view? How can we find what we have lost if we don’t know what was ever lost in the first place? Who do you trust when there is no one else left to trust? Are all voices of truth masks for yet another subversive message from the alien? We cannot turn back time, we cannot return to old ways when we are trying to find new ways, and maybe we cannot find the truth of which new ways may lead us in the right direction. Could it be that our fear of sharing the pipe and stoking the fire has led us to this place of immobility, stagnation, and the detriment of our spirit? It might be we will have to light a bonfire beneath our complacency. And that if enough fires are burned to clear away our mental cobwebs, a light will shine to guide us. I do not speak of literal fire, it is a metaphor for putting your mind to the light, to burn away the underbrush of conditioning, to cut a path to who you can be. Should it remain a priority of our lives to continue acting as slaves to the alien? Who is the alien? The alien is the Other. It is that which whispers across a screen informing you what externalized manifestations of consumer consumption are most likely to help form you into a fully realized, satisfied, and successful winner. It is the surface of appearance that beguiles us into following whims that promise salvation through the sacrifice of money for a quick fix of consumptive pleasures. But when this fails, when false identity buckles under the facade, and we are left empty and lonely, there are prescriptive medicines, so instead of finding the spirit of self, we can further turn away from awareness to a cloud of dizzy acceptance that our situation is best met through baptism in the serotonin pool of bliss.

Today, I am not certain or even a little sure where my path leads as I let go of the hand of the alien to grab another alien hand, my own. But I do know that as I walk along into uncertainty, I am in the company of the many ancestors who came before me and who also walked into an uncertain world and hope for the future. It was from this sense of curiosity and ability to explore one’s limitations that humankind embraced an alien world and found an earth that was habitable and conducive to supporting the dreams and ambitions of the alien creature that walked its lands. The earth is no longer an alien to us nor we to it; it must surely be the time for us to sit down around the fire, keep one another warm, share the pipe, and create new chants of how we can come to love one another.